We live in an exciting time. Terry Pratchett was right when he early in his career said it was a curse. Up until the day a tractor appeared, everyone more or less knew what they were doing. Then industry arrived and changed the landscape, and that’s how it looked until quite recently.
It started as a tremor on the lower deck. The world’s most modern industry had been chugging along like a train; the industrial nation of Sweden, which had supported us all with paper and steel, seemed unsinkable. When we crashed into an iceberg of information services, we quickly pulled ourselves together. A major expansion of the internet and affordable corporate deals for home computers would make sure we survived. It worked well, but we haven’t made it out the other side yet. The ship isn’t on the seabed—it’s still sinking.
Today, companies are started, developed, and go bankrupt in the same amount of time it used to take just to build the factory. Change happens fast, and since you can’t hold it back, you have two choices: go under with it or love it.
On a personal level, you can choose to develop, educate yourself, and grow—or remain where you are. Just as the farmhand stood without work when replaced by a tractor, the industrial worker will stand. You can blame it on companies moving abroad, on taxes, on immigrants (how they could make you unemployed and uneducated is beyond me), or on the government(s). It doesn’t matter what excuse you choose—you still only have two options: love change or be crushed by it.
The same applies to companies. It’s easy to believe that publishing news, articles, notices, and the like no longer pays off, but some of the world’s largest companies and organizations do exactly that. Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia have not died the newspaper death. They have earned their place in our modern society.
This doesn’t only happen from a macro perspective—let’s look at the SEO industry. Surely that’s at the forefront of change? Not at all. There are companies that fail to evolve in the right way, fast enough, or at all—even in our just-over-ten-year-old industry. The companies that were once big—5–10 years ago—have almost all been acquired, merged, or now live with declining revenues and negative results (often combinations of all of the above). And this in an industry growing at 20% per year.
The model that generated so much profit three years ago suddenly became a drag anchor that pulled down results, revenue, and customer inflow. Was it impossible to foresee? Not at all.
Not only was it possible to foresee—it wasn’t even necessary to know what would come. The important thing was not to be too locked into structures. Many of us in the industry continue to grow at rocket speed. What’s the difference between our companies and those that sink like stones when change arrives? I won’t pat myself on the back yet—it’s too early to say it works—but the intention is there: we love change.
Too many SEO agencies are locked into tactics. They learn one method of doing SEO and then apply it to every project. Of course you need a production line if you want to scale, but it must have an embedded willingness to change. SEO is not a tactic; it’s not a method. SEO is the work of achieving results. How you get there must be allowed to look different at different times—and that requires two things from those doing SEO: a willingness to change and the knowledge to understand what kind of change is needed.
When these two qualities are missing, you get the results we’ve seen: large companies burdened with red numbers, shrinking revenues, and businesses that, like the Titanic, slowly sink to the bottom. The sharks—the ones still hungry—get to feast.
Time for action!
Theory is one thing; putting it into practice is another. We ourselves are making major investments in change, and in the not-too-distant future you’ll see significant changes in our work. We take small steps continuously and prepare for larger steps when we’re ready to take them. Our ambition isn’t just to stay ahead of all our competitors in SEO—it’s to keep increasing that distance. If you want to be the best and continue to be the best, change has to happen all the time. On all fronts. Love change.
